Connie is cooking from her cookbooks!

Happy new year! And welcome to a new round of Connie is cooking! I have always loved cooking (baking not so much). I enjoy chopping, grating, slicing, pounding, (yes, really, it’s a control thing!) even weighing and measuring AND yes, cleaning up. But most of all I love to bring joy to others by serving delicious food. And yeah, I love good food. Note, the “good” – I don’t eat just to eat!

While I know many of you dislike time in the kitchen, you’ve no doubt found yourself peering into the refrigerator or scrounging through the freezer for your next meal during COVID. I know even I have run out of innovative new meals. Google searches for recipes have skyrocketed. But I’m taking a different turn….really spurred on by a comment my darling daughter-in-law made to me several years ago pointing to the floor to ceiling bookcase of cookbooks in the corner of my kitchen. “Why do you have so many cookbooks,” she asked innocently. “Don’t tell me you use them all.” It should be noted darling daughter-in-law is somewhat of a minimalist. Yet her comment struck a chord. I ended up paging through and ultimately donating probably a quarter of those books – many of which I acquired when I reviewed cookbooks for the Kansas City Star back in the late seventies!  (I even arranged them by color).

But here I am with cookbooks still stuffing that same bookcase. Suddenly I had an idea. What if I tried preparing a recipe from each of those books? True some of them are long out of print but so what? I suspect I will find some game changers that I can share with you! So come along for the journey and check back often for updates. I counted 175 cookbooks, not including some keepsake food magazines on the shelves. And then there are the boxes and boxes of recipes torn from magazines over the years. I hope to tackle some of those as well! Not sure how often I will be posting but then again, with the pandemic still raging, I look forward to filling my days with deliciousness straight from my kitchen shelves.

Good to know tips: Unlike baking, cooking gives you the latitude to improvise – change or omit an ingredient or add another. But I usually make a recipe first “as written” unless I abhor a certain ingredient (not a mushroom lover you’ll learn) or suspect the recipe seems wrong. I’ll share my comments after each recipe to guide you!

Please check back tomorrow for the first of many recipes straight from my cookbooks!